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silicon valley: “fail fast” also silicon valley: “google shuts down too many things”
public: not interested in adopting a product that likely will disappear when I start to depend on it
SA doesn't have the resources to offer the poor free Wi-Fi so they will miss out. And there is also the ongoing problem of cable theft so maybe google won't chance it here.
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Well if Google tried rewarding maintenance work, would people who do hard maintenance work and reduce tech debt actually be rewarded? Instead I think the result would be people gaming the new system and doing nothing while claiming to solve hard maintenance problems. Managers, as usual, would reward the wrong people. At least with the current system, google gets something kinda measurable.
Managers are only very tangentially involved with "rewarding" employees at Google. They do not promote them: it's the responsibility of the employee to apply for a promo, though manager has to support. And promotion decision is not made by the manager either: it's made by a committee that has never even seen the employee and knows nothing about their work other than what they choose to put in their "promotion packet"…
I find a lot of the most impactful work isn't easily measured by metrics or monetary impact. These metrics are always deceptive and if you are doing honest maintenance you may encounter many additional issues that make you look like a troublemaker. The people who get promoted often cause disasters and then fix the disaster while recording metrics. Putting in hard work to make stuff run as expected looks like doing nothing to people unfamiliar with the low level technical details.
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Google needs all the good PR it can get, these days. I'd be willing to pour money into ventures like this if I was in their position, too.
Google has been working on WiFi projects for a long time. They have enough good PR outside HN, no need to trivialize when a company takes up a good project.
It's fine praise a company that does good, but don't act as if these companies are doing it out of pure kindness of their heart when they have legal shareholders to account for.
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"This went poorly because we care far more about launch than execution" is really the same spirit as the gp's paraphrase.
Many products from Google die because is a bottom up company: many ideas that make it into products come from Engineering directly, (guys who wants o solve challenging problems), to later find out that the business analysis was poor...and an internal performance system that advocates for launches
I just can't think of any reason why, if I were building any sort of business (tech or otherwise) I would incorporate google services (apart form google search ads, perhaps) into any aspect of it that I would deem "essential" or even "important". Even Drive & the associated sheets/docs/etc I look at with an eye towards "be ready to mass download the lot of it on short notice" As an example, about two years ago they w…
There's a big difference between a paid (Google) service and a free one. Google doesn't generally shutdown paid B2B services, but it certainly does have a record of instability on free consumer services (like this wifi thing).
So, no, paid services are not free from the fear of Google's drastic and suddenly project cuts or (as near as cuts) massiveness overhauls.
I wonder why project loon/whatever google calls it's think tanks now discarded that as an idea? seems like a thing purpose built for the google brand - huge idea, requires massive funding, literally no government can prevent you from beaming internet at it's citizens without a satellite killer(which they can't deploy without intl negative attention)
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/22/fast-internet-via-satellites...
I still remember when Google promised to bring free wifi to all of the poor neighborhoods in Chicago. Amid a big frenzy of local media and politician hoopla it said was going to put access points on every streetlight. Then Google found out that when the street lights turn off, there's no power to run the access points. So it just walked away.
Uh? Duh! What did they expect? A switch in every street light? (Which also would need to be controlled in some way ...)
I don't really know why Google, a company, is doing what should be done by the government with no clear benefit to the bottom line. This is not to say they shouldn’t do this, but if you look at it that way, it shouldn't be surprising at all. If they really wanted to help they probably should have teamed up with the government to ensure that there is government buy in to the program.
I think Google is an insecure advertising company. It's as if Phillip Morris International was trying to develop solar panels and vegan food products to make everyone forget that most of their revenue comes from tobacco.
Google learned from mistakes of the past.